


The Princess, the Girl, and the Unimaginable

by Jennifer-Oksana (JenniferOksana)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Missing Scene, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2015-12-22
Packaged: 2018-05-08 11:00:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5494736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JenniferOksana/pseuds/Jennifer-Oksana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stories we tell ourselves to keep away the dark. (My first fic since 2008, I think)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Princess, the Girl, and the Unimaginable

**Author's Note:**

> "There are moments that the words don't reach  
> There is suffering too terrible to name  
> You hold your child as tight as you can  
> And push away the unimaginable" - Lin-Manuel Miranda, "It's Quiet Uptown"

 

She will always be "the princess". As one of her Nabolese attachés points out, she is the daughter of the greatest former queen (an elected queen, Leia wants to point out but never does) of Naboo and the adopted daughter of the non-elected queen of Alderaan. She is a princess by blood and rearing in the eyes of the troops. Never mind she has been a general for longer than she was ever a princess, never mind she was a Galactic Senator like her mother before her, never mind a thousand things. There are always more important things for the Resistance to deal with than whether or not Leia Organa is a princess in reality or just in the eyes of her people.

Han is dead.

Her son killed his father. Ben, who had always been so impatient to be a grown-up, to be a Jedi Knight that he could never realize the ability to wait, to have _time_ was a gift. The only gift that she could give her own son was time to grow up slowly and he had thrown it away.

And now she is left to keep going.

And now, also, the girl from Jakku. There is _something_ about her that has nothing to do with her truly spectacular strength in the Force.

Leia never had time to master her Force powers. She's never raised a lightsaber or considered becoming a Jedi or even a Force user. The one gift she has is to have a sense of what's to come, of how to resolve what no one else can, of which people matter. ( _Didn't work so well with Ben or Han, did it?_ the angry little voice in her head taunts, but that's the Dark Side and Leia knows it)

Rey reminds her of someone she can't quite recall, the same way she felt reminded when she saw the mural of Queen Amidala on Naboo when she'd gone there to rescue the Alderaanian colony thirty years ago. The girl matters. And the pragmatic side of her knows that's easy to say. She has Luke's lightsaber. She managed to fight Ben off and save her friend when the Planetkiller Base went down. She is clearly going to go find Luke after so many years - _damn Luke for running and leaving her to keep the world together_ \- of hiding from his failures.

The girl is hope for the Resistance. The girl caught Han's eye and brought him back after a decade of abandonment and scavenging.

The girl comes to her doorway with huge, mute eyes that beg forgiveness.

"I'm sorry, General," she stutters out after a minute of staring. Her sadness nearly breaks what's left of Leia's heart.

"You couldn't have stopped this," Leia tells her. "Han was never the same after we lost Ben. When he came back, he couldn't have resisted trying to bring Ben home. Chewie told me that Han didn't have to confront Ben but he went after him. He made that choice. And if anyone is responsible besides Han in this situation, it's me."

"General?" Rey asks, eyes completely blank of understanding.

"You weren't there," Leia explains. "When he left for the base, I asked him to bring our son home. I knew there was a risk of it going badly, but Han was his father, not his master and I hoped...never mind what I hoped. Kylo Ren made his choices and I don't know what that means for any of us."

How does she explain to an orphan abandoned on Jakku what any of this means? Looking at it from a remove, Leia realizes that even if Han had succeeded and her son was here now, it wouldn't have been easy. Ben would still have a strong connection to the Dark Side. He would have fought its lure slowly. They wouldn't have been able to trust him at first.

But Han would be back with her. There would have been a chance. Leia could have fought to bring him back.

"I'm sorry, General. But I hate him," Rey says. "He's so angry and he's such a bully! And that stupid, stupid lightsaber he has and why would anyone with a father who came back for him DO that?"

Oh, the heartbreak of this girl. She had brought Han back to the battle and it was clear how quickly both had taken to the other. Leia is glad and bitter to know it.

"Ben felt that Han abandoned him," Leia says. "Other than that, I don't have any idea what Ben thinks. I loved him so much -- but I was afraid of him, too, ever since he was a little boy."

Ben had been a beautiful but frustrating child. He would make his toys fly across the rooms in toddler pique, taking chunks out of the walls, crumpling steel toys without even trying. Once, Ben had had a stuffed tauntaun, given to him by Mon Mothma and much loved. Stinky and Ben had slept together for years, Stinky cuddled as tightly as possible until he really did smell.

When Ben was six, he had set Stinky on fire when Leia had tried to punish him for throwing a tantrum and pushing another boy with the Force by taking it away for the night. Ben had sobbed as he had done it, but he had not stopped staring her directly in the face with each little sob.

"Now you can't take him from me. Nobody can take him from me now," he had said once the tauntaun was smoldering. The sheer rage in her boy's eyes had sent Leia running in terror.

"I would never throw away my family if they came back for me," Rey says sullenly. Leia feels pity overwhelm her again as well as the strange feeling that there is something about this girl that matters. Something in her face is so familiar that it keeps tugging at her memory somehow.

"The Dark Side has a powerful grip," Leia says. "I've seen people do terrible things without being in its thrall, let alone while sinking into it."

"I know what it's like to feel betrayed just as much as Ren!" Rey says with sudden hotness. "My mother flew away from me. She told me she would come back. She told me..." and the girl's cheeks are coated in tears. "She left me and I don't know why. I would never hurt my own family."

Leia feels her own eyes fill with tears. "I know," she says. "I know. My mother left me when I was born. It doesn't stop hurting."

Telling that deep-buried secret - that Leia had always felt her mother had left, not just died but _left_ \- makes Leia dizzy and a little queasy. When Padmé's handmaidens had found her on Naboo after the initial peace, it had been hard not to tell them how much she had felt that Padmé's death had been a conscious abandonment. That she resented the beautiful, sad woman who they loved so much for leaving her.

"I keep hoping this is all a nightmare and that when I wake up, Han will be alive and he'll tell me I'm really his daughter," Rey chokes out, suddenly flushed with embarrassment. "He'll tell me that he never meant to leave me, that bad people made him forget me and he's come to bring me back to him and my mo...oh."

The girl's red face freezes in guilt. Leia chuckles. "I take it that you never dreamed of a famous general for a mother?" she asks with a smile that doesn't manage to reach her eyes. "Don't worry about it, Rey."

 _Bad people made her forget..._ but that's a child's story to explain what was a monstrous betrayal. Leaving a child on a world like Jakku is unforgivable in Leia's opinion. But there's a little comfort in a dream like that. That this intense girl with dark eyes is her daughter, come back to comfort her mother. To bring hope back to her father. To find Luke and bring him back. To balance the darkness in Ben so that he can find peace somehow.

It's too much to put on this girl. Leia still wonders if it couldn't all be true.

"Please," Rey says in a tiny voice, wiping away a few tears. "Tell me more about Han."

Leia sighs, the absence of Han hollow in her chest and the pain of Ben's betrayal a sour acid in her stomach. But this girl calms it a little and she's asking for almost nothing. Stories about Han. Leia has a thousand of those and more.

"I met him on the first Death Star, along with Luke," Leia says. "Luke had taken me out of the cell - they had just destroyed Alderaan and I was going to be executed. So I was in my cell, thinking about my parents, wishing I had never heard of the Force or the Rebel Alliance. Then this short boy in a stormtrooper uniform saves me and then this loud-mouthed, scruffy-looking nerf herder in that same damn jacket appears and makes me so damn mad that I want to blast him."

Rey claps her hand over her mouth. "You never!" she said. "But wasn't he handsome? Wasn't he rescuing you?"

Leia laughs. "At the time, Han was in it for a fat bounty that had just been blown up with Alderaan," she recalls. "And he was furious with me within ten minutes because I took his blaster and threw us all into a trash compactor to escape a squad of stormtroopers shooting at us. He started _in_ on me, calling me 'your worshipfulness' until I really did almost slug him in the mouth. Meanwhile, there's poor Luke, trying to understand why a princess is screaming orders at her rescuers. I was a terrible princess, you know."

"Oh?" Rey asks, clearly not believing her.

"I was absolutely terrible at the job," Leia insists. "Princesses are supposed to be graceful and sweet-tempered and diplomatic. Meanwhile I was known throughout the galaxy - by the time I was _seventeen_ , mind you - as a loud-mouth populist with no respect for even Lord Vader or Grand Moff Tarkin. By the time I was nineteen, I was sort of a secret rebel and probably the most famous woman in the galaxy. The Coruscant news services loved taking pictures of me and talking about whether or not I was dating anyone and what scandal I had gotten up to and if my parents were ashamed that I was a senator anyway. Meanwhile, I was trying to hide my treasonous leanings. And I got a _quick_ education in fixing starships and shooting Imperial troops and smuggling plans. Once I was openly in the rebellion, it got harder. People called me an ice maiden because I didn't show emotions in public, but I was a teenage girl who was a senator and a princess and a leader of the rebellion. No one would have taken me seriously if I had mentioned Alderaan and started weeping in public. They would have been very kind, but I would have been gently excluded. Because there's no room for crying girls in war."

At this, Rey perks up. "Men never understand that, do they?" she asks with a keen understanding in her voice. "They don't trust emotions, think they're weak. Well, except for Finn - and he's a bloody stormtrooper, so who knows about him!"

"He walked away from the First Order," Leia reminds her. "The first stormtrooper who was raised from birth to fight to do that. Finn isn't weak."

Rey nods fiercely. "That's true. But I want to hear more about Han and you. Because I understand you - you'd never let them keep you away from your fight," she says. "You did what you had to. Is that why you loved Han? Because he let you fight?"

"Han Solo couldn't stop me from doing a damn thing I wanted," Leia answers, grinning at the idea of Han stopping her from fighting. He'd tried more than once and he'd always, always regretted it. "He was always trying to be noble and protect me and I damn well wouldn't be put to the side, even by someone who loved me as much as Han did. We fought so much about it because we loved each other. Han would have been just as happy if we'd gone out to some uncharted territory, raised a family, and left it all behind. He never understood why I couldn't stop fighting."

Rey is nodding along, like she understands something that no one else in her life ever has. But for a girl to endure as long as Rey has, waiting for her family to come back - of course Rey understands what it is to have to keep going, to keep fighting to stay alive and whole.

If only Rey could be her daughter. She has so many stories she could give the girl, gifts for the lost child. Stories about Padmé Naberrie Amidala, the youngest queen in the history of Naboo and the youngest senator in galactic history before Leia herself had taken on the role. Stories about Bail and Breha Organa and what they taught her about what it meant to be Alderaanian and love peace, culture, and art better than war. Stories she had learned about Anakin Skywalker, before and after he turned. More about Luke and Han. Even Ben.

But in the end, Rey would be stuck with Leia as her mother. Nobody who had met Kylo Ren would dream of that.

"I don't think I knew you and Han Solo were married," Rey says, her brow a bit furrowed. "I'd heard a few tales of you - not as many as Luke Skywalker or Han Solo, but some - and it doesn't come up."

"It wouldn't. I keep my private life out of the public eye," Leia says, thoughts racing helplessly. Her heart is icy with dread now, knowing that she has fallen madly in love with this girl and the dream that Rey is her true child. Her daughter, the granddaughter of queens and Jedi who will finally bring balance to the Force. Proof that poison doesn't run in Skywalker blood. Proof that she is not a complete failure as a mother, because what sort of mother raises a son who kills his father in cold blood?

"That must hurt," Rey says. "If I understand right, General, you stayed here. You kept fighting even when Han went back to smuggling and Luke Skywalker vanished and your son went to the Dark Side. Why shouldn't the stories be about you?"

"Because I'm not a legend. I'm just stubborn," Leia answers gracefully. Rey smiles, not entirely believing her. Smart kid.

"And what will you do now?" Rey asks.

"I don't know how to do anything else except to keep going and keep fighting," Leia says, shaking her head. "I don't think I can ever stop. I didn't want that for Ben. I wanted him to have peace. I want you to have peace, too."

Her son would laugh at her dreams of peace. He would say it was another way that Leia had denied her destiny her entire life. He had hissed poison at her when they had last spoken. The anger in his eyes, the vicious bravado papered over the hurt in him, the clear delight he'd had in saying something he'd never dared before embracing the Dark in him.

 _If you'd been trained, you could stop me, couldn't you, Mother? With your Force strength, you could do so much more - but you're afraid. You're afraid that_ he _is in you. You would rather wall it away than help Master Skywalker and the Jedi. Or is it that you're too much of a coward to know what you've denied the galaxy? Princess, Senator, General - but that's not what your destiny was meant to be, was it? Is that why you sent Father and Master Skywalker to 'reason' with me? So that you didn't have to hear me ask you to come with me, to train to be who you truly are?_

Rey is looking at her strangely. "What did he say to you?" she asks. "Kylo Ren."

"It doesn't matter," Leia lies. "He was trying to hurt me. He'll try to hurt you, too, when you meet again. There's so much hurt in Ben that he keeps turning to anger and hate to keep himself from coming back. He finds what hurts you and he'll use it against you. Be careful of that."

The girl nods. Leia could scream. Everything she is saying is true, but she's leaving out the heart of the matter, the thing not even she and Han could talk about.

Ben had told the truth. Leia had refused to be trained in the Force because she was afraid, sick to death afraid, of how much of _him_ was coiled in her heart. After Ben had showed such a tendency to be like Vader, she had been even more adamant she had no time to train. As for the rest - she didn't think she had denied her destiny, but Luke...Luke had said something so strange when he left that she wondered, much like she wondered about Rey.

"There's always been a wall around you," Luke had said as he packed, the two of them silently at war over the decision. "I've never been able to gauge your strength. I've even had trouble sensing your feelings when you don't want me to."

"You're my brother and I love you," Leia had replied mechanically, trying to accept that Luke was leaving her behind without screaming. "I will always be open to you."

"That's not what I mean," Luke said.  "Even right now, I can sense you love me and you're afraid for me, but there's a part of yourself that you don't share with anyone. I didn't even sense it before Ben talked about it. It takes a strong understanding of the Force to keep yourself so apart from it."

"I don't know anything about the Force and you know it," Leia had replied tartly.

"Do I?" he'd asked. "Are you sure?"

It was the last thing he'd said to her.

"General?" the girl asks.

It would be easy to keep the girl with her. Rey's so young and afraid of her powers. She wants a family. Leia could use that to keep her and raise another version of herself to keep away from the Force, to fight hard and fight alone. But it would be wrong.

This girl is another chance for her and Leia is going to do right this time.

"My apologies," Leia says. "I was thinking about Luke. I think you should be the one to go and bring him home. He can help you with your new powers, better than anyone."

Rey will bring Luke back. That won't be any easier than if Han had succeeded in bringing Ben home, but the girl deserves the right to be trained, to be who she dreams of being. Leia knows that means that Rey and Luke will end up close, that she'll belong to him the way Ben did, but it's the right thing for Rey. It's her destiny.

"Of course, I'll go," Rey says automatically. "But, General-- Leia--"

"Yes?" Leia asks.

"I wouldn't mind, you know," Rey says awkwardly. "If you were my mother. I wouldn't mind."

It takes all of Leia's strength to keep from crying. "I wouldn't mind, either," she says, putting a hand on the girl's arm. "You should go to bed, Rey. I see a long road in front of you."

Rey half-smiles. "When it's done, will you tell me more about Han? About all of you?"

Leia closes her eyes. "Of course," she says, not knowing if she's lying. "Of course."


End file.
